Deadly Dye and a Soy Chai: a Danger Cove Hair Salon Mystery (Danger Cove Mysteries Book 5) (18 page)

In
A Deadly Dye and a Soy Chai
, Cassidi is ashamed of the Victorian house that she inherited from her Uncle Vinnie because of its lurid past. Do you think she is right to feel this way?

Cassidi is also horrified by her late Uncle Vinnie's "art collection." Is there an object in your home or an heirloom in your family that embarrasses you? What is it?

If you could visit Danger Cove, where would you most like to go? And whom would you most want to meet?

Cassidi is addicted to espresso and Fredericksburg peaches, and Gia loves flavored vodka and Nutella. What's your favorite vice?

Gia and Amy enjoy Italian and German food. What's your favorite ethnic food? Do you have any ethnic recipes that have been handed down in your family? What are they?

Leona Hawthorne, a.k.a. Margaret Appleby, had interesting taste in reading. Have you read any of the books on her shelf? If not, what is the most controversial book you've ever read (besides
Fifty Shades of Grey
, of course)?

The color blue is prominent in
A Deadly Dye and a Soy Chai
. What does it represent for Prudence? And what does it mean to you?

Do you think Detective Ohlsen should have arrested Cassidi for interfering in the investigation? Why or why not?

Uncle Vinnie's death is still an unsolved mystery. Why do you think he was killed?

Most importantly, do you think Cassidi and Zac are a good match?

* * * * *

In her previous life, Traci Andrighetti was an award-winning literary translator and a Lecturer of Italian at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned a PhD in Applied Linguistics. But then she got wise and ditched that academic stuff for a life of crime—writing, that is. These days Traci is the national bestselling author of the Franki Amato mysteries and the Danger Cove Hair Salon mysteries.

To learn more about Traci, visit her online at:
www.traciandrighetti.com

Elizabeth Ashby was born and raised in Danger Cove and now uses her literary talent to tell stories about the town she knows and loves. Ms. Ashby has penned several Danger Cove Mysteries, which are published by Gemma Halliday Publishing. While she does admit to taking some poetic license in her storytelling, she loves to incorporate the real people and places of her hometown into her stories. She says anyone who visits Danger Cove is fair game for her poisoned pen, so tourists beware! When she's not writing, Ms. Ashby enjoys gardening, taking long walks along the Pacific coastline, and curling up with a hot cup of tea, her cat, Sherlock, and a thrilling novel.

* * * * *

Danger Cove Hair Salon Mysteries

Deadly Dye and a Soy Chai

Franki Amato Mysteries
:

Limoncello Yellow

Prosecco Pink

Rosolio Red
(holiday short story)

* * * * *

of a

DANGER COVE MYSTERIES SHORT STORY

A KILLING IN THE MARKET

A DANGER COVE FARMERS' MARKET MYSTERY

BY

GIN JONES & ELIZABETH ASHBY

* * * * *

"It was a dark and stormy night," intoned a serious-faced fifth-grade boy seated with his legs dangling over the edge of the temporary stage. Behind him, the backdrop portrayed that dark and stormy night, with equally dark and stormy ocean waves below. Rising above the backdrop, a couple of hundred feet behind the stage, was a real lighthouse at the very edge of a rocky cliff overlooking the harbor.

The boy stared at me, possibly because I was the front-row guest of honor for the play, but judging from the slightly panicked look on his face, more likely because someone had told him he should concentrate on just one person if he was nervous about speaking to an audience of about a hundred people.

I'd been told that I have a reassuring presence. Apparently, everyone who'd ever met me shared the same first impression: I was solid, take-charge, and unflappable. Not really the sort of description a woman in her thirties dreams of inspiring, but it was reasonably accurate. I was a little over average height and large-boned, and I worked hard to keep the "solid" from becoming flabby. The take-charge trait came naturally too me, as the oldest of five children, and from what I'd heard about my ancestors, the unflappability was just as much due to my DNA as the large bones were.

I nodded at the boy on the stage, willing him to conquer his stage fright.
Snap out of it!

A moment later, I heard those exact words coming from behind the curtains to the boy's left, probably spoken by the teacher who'd sponsored and directed the play that the children had written.

The boy started and brushed his hand over the script lying on the stage beside him for reassurance but didn't pick it up.

"It was a dark and stormy night," he repeated, this time with all the composure and clear enunciation of a television news anchor three times his age. "And Nana Dolores, whose real name was Maria Dolores, worried about the ships sailing near Danger Cove."

Another boy raced onto the stage, dressed in what was probably supposed to mark him as a sailor, but he actually looked much more like a Halloween-style pirate, complete with a cutlass and an eye patch. "Argh, mateys. We're going down with all hands on deck."

I stifled my laughter at the enthusiastic overacting while another dozen or so young actors joined him on the stage to portray a particularly memorable night in the life of my own great-great-great-grandmother's tenure as the first lighthouse keeper in Danger Cove. I'd heard the story plenty of times before from my mother. My namesake, Maria Dolores, had become as close to an overnight sensation as was possible in the 1920s when she, her daughter, and her granddaughter had saved the lives of a dozen sailors.

In my mother's version, the story had featured a great deal fewer cutlasses, eyepatches, and heroics, and a great deal more callous child endangerment and foolish disregard of personal safety. I also knew what few others did, that the story hadn't been quite as uplifting as it was being portrayed. The rescues had been real all right, but what the newspapers had neglected to mention was that the rescued sailors had been smuggling whiskey during Prohibition, and my great-great-great-grandmother had turned them over to the authorities for prosecution and substantial federal prison sentences. From what I'd been told, all of my ancestors—at least until my mother had come along to break with tradition—had been great believers in law and order.

On the stage, a young girl in a long calico dress and white pinafore-style apron called out, "Come with me, girls. We must save the sailors." This personification of my seventy-year-old great-great-great-grandmother hobbled across the stage, leaning on a cane.

I'd seen several pictures of the original Maria Dolores, and we looked enough alike to be sisters. People had undoubtedly considered her solid, take-charge, and unflappable too. She had my large-boned build, dark hair, and square face. Although I hoped that I didn't usually wear the grim, stoic expression she had in all of her pictures. Her daughter had very similar looks, and their DNA had reasserted itself in me, after somehow getting scrambled when it produced my redheaded, round-faced, drama queen of a mother.

The Maria Dolores on the stage was joined a moment later by another girl in a matching costume, presumably my then thirty-five-year-old great-great-grandmother. Whoever had done the hair and makeup apparently thought anyone over the age of thirty was ancient, since the two women had matching white hair in buns, and faces as wrinkled as shrunken apples. The hair was wrong for the younger woman, but the face might not have been too far off even for a younger woman of that era. Keeping a lighthouse was hard work, with constant exposure to the elements.

A third girl skipped onto the stage wearing another matching dress and apron, although it was a little shorter than the others were, and she'd been spared the bun and makeup. She had to be portraying my great-grandmother, only twelve years old at the time.

All three of them had died before I was born, and I'd never met my grandmother due to my mother's estrangement from her family. I'd been born here in Danger Cove, but my mother had taken me to Seattle when I was two-years-old, and I'd never had any reason to return in the intervening thirty-four years. The invitation to be the guest of honor at today's grand opening of the Lighthouse Farmer's Market had come at just the right moment. I'd recently closed down my financial planning practice, and, much too young to retire at age thirty-six, I was taking some time to find a new career that appealed to me.

Fortunately, I'd taken my own planning advice and accumulated a decent portfolio because I was having more trouble than I'd expected in figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. All I knew for sure was that after fourteen years behind a desk—with a widening backside to prove it—I wanted to do something a bit more physical.

One of the careers I was considering was house flipping. A friend had suggested that I talk to Alexandra Jordan here in Danger Cove. I'd been assured that as the owner of Finials and Facades Renovation and Restoration Services, Alex could give me good advice about house flipping. Still, I'd been reluctant to contact her at first, in part because I wasn't particularly sold on the career, which I suspected would get in the way of my one personal appearance indulgence: fingernail art.

The other consideration that had held me back from meeting with Alex before now was that I wasn't sure her experience would be relevant. As a lifelong city dweller, I had no intention of ever settling down in a small town, least of all this one, which my mother had told me was a terrible place to live, full of vicious, backstabbing, coldhearted people. While the town's chamber of commerce described it as "a sleepy little town in the Pacific Northwest" and claimed the title of "friendliest,"—my mother had completely different adjectives for it, few of them fit for polite company.

But then I'd been invited to make the pleasant drive along the coast from Seattle, all expenses paid, as the guest of the Lighthouse Farmer's Market. I could do my research into house flipping during my visit, at no cost to myself other than a few hours of my time, which I had in abundance now that my office was shut down. Getting the most out of any opportunity was just the sort of thing I'd always recommended to my financial planning clients; minimizing expenses was as important to financial planning as maximizing income.

Based on all of my mother's stories, I'd expected to have, at best, a boring weekend, but it was turning out to be quite pleasant, with the town seeming much more like the chamber of commerce's description than my mother's. The Ocean View B&B was easily the equal of the very best B&Bs I'd stayed in elsewhere. Even my mother, predisposed to dislike everything in Danger Cove, couldn't have found any fault with it or with its manager.

And then there was the director of the Danger Cove Historical Museum, Gillian Torres, who'd issued the invitation and had been waiting for me when I arrived at the market this morning. Gil—pronounced with a hard G, she told me, and not a J sound—was a statuesque black woman with a tendency to break into song at the least little provocation. She'd been humming the theme from
Gilligan's Island
at the beginning of the play, which would have been annoying if anyone else had done it, but her voice was so rich that my only complaint was that she'd stopped too soon.

Gil was seated in the folding chair beside me in the front row of the audience. The thirty-minute play had barely begun when she looked down at her phone and then leaned over to whisper, "I'm sorry, but there's something I need to take care of. I'll meet you at the entrance to the lighthouse when this is over."

I nodded my understanding. Gil had arranged to give me a tour of the lighthouse where three generations of my ancestors had lived. Normally it was closed to the public out of safety concerns. The exterior had been rehabilitated in recent years, thanks to the Save the Danger Cove Lighthouse Committee, but the interior renovations were still very much a work in progress. I'd been told that the town was still raising funds for the work, and some of the proceeds from today's events, including the raffle of the quilt being completed over near the parking lot, would go to that cause. My great-great-great-grandmother had been a quilter, and I'd read somewhere that quilting was a three or four billion dollar a year industry. Maybe I'd look into the opportunities there more thoroughly if house flipping didn't work out.

The play continued, with a variety of heroic efforts to get a boat into the water to go after six dripping wet sailors pantomiming going down for the third time in the portion of the stage that represented the waters outside the cove. It was perhaps five minutes after Gil had excused herself when I heard shouting over to my left, where the actual farmer's market was set up with temporary stalls selling produce, baked goods, and craft items.

There were two rows of stalls lining opposite sides of a ten-foot-wide path that led up a slope to the lighthouse. A thin man, probably in his late twenties, with long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail and dressed in a bright Hawaiian shirt and sagging jeans, stood in the middle of the path between the two rows of stalls, stopping people at random and telling them, at the top of his considerable lungs, just how much he loved hot peppers.

"Try it, you'll like it," he shouted before turning to the next clump of people. He repeated his words and pointed back over his shoulder at the first stall in the far row. The farmer there had ducked out of sight, apparently not terribly appreciative of the free advertising.

Another man, around the same age as the disruptive one, but in khaki pants and a T-shirt printed with the town name and an image of its lighthouse on the front and
Market Manager
in bold letters on the back, ran over to intercept the boisterous pepper fan. The manager was a good six inches shorter than the loud man and about fifty pounds overweight. The manager began arguing with the other man, although his voice wasn't quite as loud, and I couldn't make out his words. The manager's hand gestures, pointing toward the exit, made his meaning clear:
Leave. Now.

"Peppers here," the loud man shouted. "Get 'em while they're hot!" He broke into giggles, oblivious to the manager's clenched fists and escalating anger.

A few yards away at the quilting bee, a white-haired, frail-looking woman seated at what was clearly the most honored spot around the quilt frame rose to her feet. Another woman, brunette and probably ten years younger than the first, rushed to the first woman's side, and both went over to where the commotion continued.

The white-haired quilter said something that immediately silenced both the disruptive man and the manager. The pepper lover hung his head, covered his mouth as another giggle threatened to escape, and turned toward the exit. While the younger quilter escorted the evicted man to a uniformed officer in the parking lot presumably to ensure that he left, the white-haired one kept the manager in the path outside the pepper farmer's stall. A farmer in jeans and a lime green T-shirt with a logo I couldn't read from here came over to talk to the manager, and the white-haired woman headed back toward the quilting bee. The two men engaged in a heated conversation, but it wasn't as loud or entertaining as the one with the pepper fan.

The play had come to a stop while the potentially more entertaining real-life events were taking place. I turned back to the stage to see a short, chubby woman with shoulder-length, dark brown hair peeking around the edge of the stage's front curtain above the narrator's head. She was far too old to be part of the play itself. Close to retirement age, I thought, which meant she was probably the teacher who'd sponsored and directed the play. She was waving her arms and hissing to get the actors' attention.

The narrator was the first to turn around and look at her. The teacher whispered, "Go back to the last voice-over. Loudly."

The boy nodded, consulted the script on the floor next to him, and began to speak. By the time he was finished, the rest of the players had returned to their places on the stage. The girl playing Maria Dolores punched one of the wet sailors in the upper arm. He rubbed where he'd been hit, said "Hey," and then seemed to realize where they were. "Oh. Right." He resumed his drowning motions and called out, "Help! Help! We're poor, lowly sailors, pressed into service, who never learned to swim!"